We continue to look for ways to reduce the energy demands of our IT infrastructure at TRU. I’ve been working with Dr Tom Owen, our new Director of Environmental Sustainability, to find ways of reducing our CO2 footprint through the effective use of IT. This year we are focusing on reducing the storage and handling of paper transcripts, letters and other documents required to support students as part of Project SAGE. Other green projects we are working on include:

• Cloud Computing;
• IP Video Conferencing;
• Paperless HR Processes;
• Document Management Systems;
• Desktop Virtualization;
• Desktop Power Management;
• Running the data centre hotter;
• Paperless procurement, and;
• Full product life-cycle CO2 footprint considerations.

I’ve placed these initiatives in a boston matrix to show which projects we should do first (i.e. quick wins and low hanging fruit.)

An impediment to any green strategy is simply a lack of information on energy use. That is about to change, at least in people’s homes.

Look for more manufacturers to include a Zigbee chip, a low-power wireless device that can be placed in  appliances  throughout your  home. The first benefit of the Zigbee chip will be making you aware of how much power is actually been used by each appliance. All those mod cons you’ve plugged in are vampires, slowly draining energy and costing you money. What appears “off” isn’t really.

Zigbee chips will allow all those power hogs to talk to software that controls switches and power bars that can regulate shut off equipment. Once we’ve made that great leap forward, things get more interesting. When we realize we are all in this together, you will let your appliances communicate with the Smart Grid that lets the power company control your homes energy demand (and perhaps raise or lower your thermostat) to keep the grid stable.

Reducing energy consumption in the home by only 10% in the US would be the carbon equivalent of removing 8 million cars off the road each year.

This connection with the smart grid will also let you push the power you may generate through home wind or solar gear back to it.  A handy utility from 3Tier lets you determine how much potential solar or wind power is available in your area. Look for more consumer power generation devices at your local hardware store.

Dimension 3D Printers

I must admit It took me a while to understand why there was so much buzz about “Additive Fabrication” or 3-D Printing. Machines that create 3D Models from CAD Files have been around for a while. For example, many dentist offices now have machines that can “print” you a new tooth crown, customized to your mouth, while you wait.

The disruptive aspect of 3-D Printing comes about when these machines are available to everyone. While there may be limited appeal at the moment to printing a plastic toy or iPod cover at home, just think about the benefits of being able to “print” spare parts for all those machines and electronic devices we have. Instead of ordering the part and playing the waiting game,  you’d simply buy the CAD file from the vendor’s website, download it to your 3-D printer, press start and voila!

A CBC Article on 3-D printing mentions one company called “Desktop Factory” that is aiming its technology at the small business market.

Desktop Factory aims to get the price down to under $1,000 US over the next three to five years and add different printable inks, such as those that produce flexible or transparent models. That would open up the market to everyday consumers, who could use 3D printers to fabricate household items, such as bendable toys or iPod covers, Lewis says.

“People will be able to disrupt the manufacturing chain and print replacement parts rather than having to drive to Home Depot for something that was manufactured in China,” she says. “We haven’t begun to tap into the users who really need the technology.”

Yeah I know, this is all hype. But just think about the potential. Suppose your hardware store printed out that tiny washer for your antique facet while you waited? Suppose it didn’t have to stock every washer under the sun? What about the aircraft that’s grounded at the airport waiting for a small engine part to be shipped from afar? The mechanics could just print a new one as required. Along the way, wouldn’t removing all the shipping, storage and handling be good for the environment?

Think about all the things creative designers and TRU technology students could do with an in house, desktop model builder.

What’s even cooler are these sugar sculptures. I gotta get a 3D Sugar Printer!

Pour some sugar on my 3D Bread

London’s Sunday Times reports that, according to a Harvard study, each Google search generates 7g of CO2. Two google searches, for example searching for  “vortex shedding” or “Faulkner on the past” uses 14g of CO2, the same amount of energy required to boil a tea-kettle.

Now I was quite shocked by this number and no technical information was provided in the report. Google disputes the numbers provided by the Harvard study, saying that searches use the equivalent of much less energy (0.2 grams of CO2.)

Whatever the right number, it does bring into focus the giga-watts of power required to run massive data centres. That said, I’m sure Google is doing what it can to make all that infrastructure as energy efficient as possible.

Just to be on the safe side, remember to hold your breath with each search.

Vortex shedding behind a circular cylinder. Courtesy, Cesareo de La Rosa Siqueira. via Google

Here’s some “blue-skying” for the year ahead in IT. Note that I reserve the right to be breathtakingly wrong.

1. Being Green Saves Green

Everything will continue to be about reducing IT’s CO2 footprint and reducing costs. Virtualization technologies (VMWare etc.) now rule the server room and are a no-brainer approach; desktop virtualization technologies (VMWare, XenSource, Citrix, nComputing, etc.) will improve student access to bespoke applications, improve access and reduce costs.

The total carbon footprint of technologies now guides all our purchases. We now consider the whole lifecycle of devices: how and where electronics are built, how much power they use and how the can be safely disposed of form the evaluation criteria.

Of course, all this virtualization reduces the number of machines required – spelling bad news for hardware vendors.

2. Disaster Recovery

2008 was a bad year for “cloud” outages. Google and Amazon had major service interruptions. Banks and stock market systems failed. In 2009, keeping things running will be the core competency of IT teams. To do this properly we will rely on new technologies and partners to protect critical data and networks.

3. The Year of Living with Video Conferencing

2009 is going to be the year when we have to start delivering good video conferencing services. We aren’t talking about 3D holographic telepresence just yet, but high definition cameras, good quality sound and wireless microphones, proper lighting will improve the videoconferencing experience and provide a sound alternative for in-person lectures and meetings. Improvements to videoconferencing and synchronous collaboration tools should slowly reduce the requirement for travel.

4. Can’t we all just get along – with all those new devices?

Over the last few years we’ve seen a veritable plankton-bloom of equipment on our wireless “bubble.” With laptops, net-books (ie mini laptops),  iPods, iPhones, iDogs (kidding), Smart Phones, RFID Tags, Security Equipment, dual mode phones,  – the number of new consumer devices connecting will continue to grow exponentially.  Survival for IT in this new landscape requires us to be really good at security and network availability – policing the stuff on the network may be tricky. Strong security and identity management will be critical here.

5. And all those new devices better work well together

This year expect better touch screens, cameras, power management, and, most importantly,  less wires connecting those devices. I’d loove to do away with the big plastic box of cables I have to plug everything in. Other vendors and Open Sourcers should follow Apple’s beautiful walled garden approach to device and application integration.

Walled Garden - by Paul Englefield

6. Speaking of Netbooks, is it the beginning of the end of Desktops?

Windows Version 7.0 will no doubt emerge this year but it’s overall presence will be a big yawn. How important are operating systems in a world of “information anywhere” devices? I expect to see continued use of mobile computing with users bypassing laptops to Netbooks or smart-phones. Applications via the Cloud will figure prominently in this shift.

7. Will ERP Vendors start to get “SaaS-y”?

I’ve got no idea how or when the (Enterprise Resources Planning) ERP vendors will get there but Small and Medium Sized (SME) customers, their last frontier for new revenue, will want their ERP solution as  Software as a Service (SaaS) where applications are used and rented on-demand. Here at TRU, I’d expect we will be using more SaaS solutions into the future as everyone rushes into the “clouds.” That’s probably the new gold dream.

8. I’ve Looked at Clouds from Both Sides Now

While I don’t think things will change overnight, I’m a believer that if cloud computing offers a greener, cheaper and easier way of doing things to your standard data-centre model, it will succeed. That said, I don’t think people will shut down their IT infrastructures overnight. Look forward to seeing cloud-based implementations of productivity applications like MS-exchange, gmail, sharepoint, office, google docs taking a foothold in enterprises. On its heels applications from Intuit, Mint, 37Signals, and the like will continue to gain in popularity.

Big ERP’s may take much longer to migrate to the cloud. Perhaps “Platform as a Service” will be the approach that succeeds for core enterprise applications. Can you say Service Bureau 2.0?

We will continue to work with other schools to create “trusted clouds” of shared services.

9. Social Networking

Now that the whole world is on Facebook (fb) or some other social network, look forward to seeing more corporate implementations of social network-like packages. I’m not thinking that we would actually use fb for University collaboration (I’m not convinced fb groups or applications actually have much uptake)  but look forward to fb look and feel in collaborative applications behind the firewall to improve internal communications.

10. The Search for IT Talent Continues

Global Economic Downturn or not, the IT talent pool is shallow. We will continue having trouble attracting and retaining pros over the next year. Woe is me.

Good Evening,

1. If you are currently using Internet Explore 7.0, please don’t. A critical vulnerability exists that could infect your computer, launch malicious code remotely from your machine, steal your passwords and bring all sorts of other nasties upon you. At this time we aren’t sure if anti-virus software will catch the vulnerability. I suggest you run ”Mozilla Firefox” or some other browser until there is a rock-solid patch for Internet Explorer 7.0 – expected some time in January 2009. For TRU users, Firefox should already be installed on your desktop computer. The IT Service Desk will provide you any help you need. Update – Microsoft has now released a patch for this. Run Windows Updates – Security.
   
2. You may have noticed that the Toronto Stock Exchange has been down all day due to a “computer problem.” You may also recall that the London Stock Exchange was down all day in September.  Two things come to mind here, a) It would totally suck to be the IT Manager at those outfits and b) in our rush to cloudify everything, we may want to take extra care of those systems that can kill our fragile economies;
3. Green idea of the day – run the data centre hotter. While we currently keep the A/C on full tilt in our data centre, telecom companies are starting to run theirs at 35 degrees C. Given the bone chilling weather of late, I wouldn’t mind being in a nice warm server farm about now. Sorry, no fancy drinks allowed;
4. In other, non-IT related news, Canada was voted the friendliest place on Earth in an HSBC expat survey. The link is to a rather odd article (i.e. not as “in-depth” as advertised)  but nevertheless isn’t it great to be finally recognized as being so friendly, eh?
5. Sadly, your correspondent has been laid low with a bad flu. If he was smart he would have seen this sickness coming on Google’s Flu Trend Tracker and stayed inside, avoiding all contact.

It’s about time that I started to do top 10 lists on my blog. For the record I originally posted this on our website in January 2007 but this is new and improved for 2008! Also, the items on my top ten lists are in no particular order…

In all seriousness, the ICT industry is, according to Gartner, as big a polluter as the aviation industry so we have lots of work to do to reduce CO2 emissions. Here are a few things we are doing:

1. Perhaps the biggest energy saver has come from the move from CRT to LCD monitors. LCD displays use only a third of the energy with a similar sized CRT. When you have thousands of monitors like we do, it adds up…
2. We continue to look for ways of reducing paper by providing people access to on-line reports, electronic mail or electronic workflow where possible.
3. We also actively promote the use of IP based video conferencing to reduce travel. In fact, we have 720p high definition video conferencing in place if you want to look really good.
4. The digital signage currently in use reduces the need for printing bulletin board ads. These displays also shut off at night to save energy.
5. Speaking of shutting off at night, currently all multimedia projectors connected to Crestron controls automatically shut off at 11pm each night. Except for the labs open 24 hours a day, all other lab PC’s are set to power down at 12:15am every night.
6. We are going crazy with VMWARE technology in the server room with a goal of 60% of our server instances running as virtualized sessions. This means that fewer servers and disks need to be purchased. Besides from reducing costs, the cooling requirements are reduced in the data centre, saving significant energy. We are currently testing desktop virtualization technologies to do get the same success
7. Our new data centre is a “lights out” environment – meaning just that!
8. Heat generated from the new data centre in the BCCOL is recovered and used to provide heat for offices.
9. The TRU computer leasing program means that end-of-lease doesn’t mean end-of-life. Instead of going to a landfill, TRU’s lease returned equipment is sold to secondary markets. All Apple products are manufactured with full-lifecycle green standards – meaning that the devices are mostly aluminum and glass.
10. Power management is enabled on all campus printing devices.
11. We lease equipment with ultra efficient power supplies. By this one simple move, we reduce energy requirements equivalent to burning approximately 12,000 US gallons of gasoline per year.
12. We are actively looking at alternatives to hosting applications locally, including Software as a Service and Cloud Computing.

Wow, it was bound to happen. After all these years of me spouting off about the benefits of technology and the paperless office, the Economist now reports that paper use is falling.  No longer are printers spewing endless reams of paper to provide information. Well, not really, they are just spewing a bit less…

Take a look at your own paper use habits. I for one have gone paperless with my travel boarding passes, gas receipts, ATM receipts, bills, tax forms and the like. At work I rarely print out meeting materials, just lug the laptop.  Our new HR/Payroll System at TRU will eliminate more paper from the mix as pay stubs and tax receipts etc go electric.

At work, the single greatest  boon to my paper reduction is the fact that the office printer is located a long way away from my desk. It’s just too darn inconvenient to print stuff out. I rarely print out emails unless they go on and on, page after electronic page.

So I decree it’s the beginning of the end (of the beginning) for office paper. I can’t live without books, magazines and newspapers so until electronic  paper is a commercial reality I will continue to buy these by the metric tonne. This move to e-Paper could take a while, but, with those nimbostratus clouds hanging over it, our inveterate pulp and paper industry needs to rapidly adapt and change with the changing times.

After spending the last 20 years as an IT manager, I shudder to think of the mountain of electronic debri my work has generated. It’s actually pretty darn scary. Thinking of all that lead and mercury leaching into the watertables of the world and the lungs of salvagers in Asia (where most of this stuff is shipped) is a depressing thought.

To start to combat this problem, the BC Provincial Government recently started to levi a fee on new electronics to fund a safe recycling program run by EnCorp through-out the province. In Kamloops you can now drop off your electronic junk for free at the Lorne Street Return-It recycling centre off the Holston connector.

I loaded up the car full of old computers, monitors, cables and other items and headed down. You will feel so much better when you know that your cyber waste is being disposed of properly. Now if they could only make new computer motherboards out of beatle-kill pine trees…

I’ll talk more about what IT Services is doing to reduce, reuse and recycle in other posts.